The church is messy, isn’t it?

When I look around, I see that we’re often unsafe for the hurting, unkind to those who don’t see the world the way we do, and unlike Jesus in how we relate to people.

We often tack our nationalism, patriotism, racism, classism, favoritism, or our preferred political-economic model such as socialism or capitalism onto our faith and find ways for the Bible to support our views.

We fear the others, the outsiders, and the unfamiliar. We reject science and go to war against educators, researchers, climate scientists, and healthcare experts.

We eat our own. When faith leaders fail publicly, we either pounce with “I told you so’s” or we give them more power and influence without moving through real repentance.

We often overpromise and underdeliver on solutions for human needs like connection, significance, and belonging. At times we even confuse materialistic prosperity with divine blessing while ignoring the poor and marginalized.

We become dogmatic about secondary, non-essential issues and we splinter, split, and scatter. We institutionalize what should be organic and over-spiritualize what should come more naturally to us.

And I say “we” because I’m part of the problem. I’ve been guilty of many of the things I’ve mentioned and I’m very likely still guilty of some things that remain hidden in the shadows and blind spots of my heart.

But… Jesus isn’t his church.

And I’m here for Jesus.

He had this crazy notion that he could gather a bunch of misfits and broken selfish people and turn their lives upside down with such grace that they, in turn, would share the good news about him with others and turn the world upside down.

Jesus had this radical dream that the church could touch and change and affect communities for good, be a voice for both moral conviction and empathy and compassion.

Jesus invites us to come and to see what he is all about, what he stood for, whom he died for, and what he’s doing in the world today as the living King of a new kind of kingdom.

He invites us to die to ourselves, to lay down our selfish ambition and our traditional understanding of power structures to adopt a whole new way of thinking and a whole new way of life.

And this new life is the way of Love. It’s worship and serving and growing and leading and leaning into him and each other and finding the next lost, hurting, broken sinner and wrapping our arms around them to include them in God’s family.

So I can’t give up on the church because, as messy as she is, she’s His idea. Jesus died for her, was raised for her, and commissioned her to be light in the darkness and love to the lost until he comes back to fix it all.

Ready to get messy? You’ll never know how greatly God wants to use you in this world until you’re willing to move toward the messes.

 

by Brandon Cox: Which, of all the commandments in the Bible, is the most important?

Both Jesus and Paul argue that it is love – love for God and love for neighbors.

Paul explains why that’s true, but it’s hard for some of us to embrace his reasoning:

Love makes it impossible to harm another, so love fulfills all that the law requires.

~ Romans 13:10 TPT

So Paul says that love is the beginning and end of the law. If you really, truly love people the way God does, you will fulfill everything else God commanded you to do.

Why is this hard to grasp? Because we’re used to religion being about God’s demand for worship and our response of obedience. And granted, God certainly expects and deserves to be worshipped and we should certainly respond with obedience. But that’s not God’s biggest priority for us.

While we are focused on religion’s vertical orientation (me and God), God is focused on the horizontal orientation of my faith (me and other people). And there is no better way to honor God and to share the good news about Jesus than to show genuine love for other people.

This simplifies life a lot, doesn’t it? Instead of living for achievements and accolades, we get to simply live to love.

You’ll never know what the truest and highest form of love is until you see Jesus Christ as the Redeemer who died on the cross for the sins of mankind. And when you really understand that moment of sacrifice and what it provided for all of us, you’ll never be the same.

That kind of love is contagious. It spreads. Once you’ve received it, you simply have to give it away and tell others about it. And when your life is about loving others the way God does so that you can point them toward him, you are already performing the greatest service God has asked for.

So, really, go love someone today.

I first met my wife in high school. I was a senior, she was a junior, and we were seven lockers apart.

We met. We talked… a LOT. We fell in love.

That phrase is actually a pretty good descriptor of what often happens when a guy and a girl first start dating. There’s a strange mix of chemicals in the brain that give us a sense of euphoria. It’s a drug, and the high lasts, according to researchers, eighteen months or so.

During that first period of any serious romantic relationship where both parties share mutual feelings of being in love with each other, there are lots of notes and phone calls and dates spent just driving and talking and staring at each other a lot. Our friends make fun of us as they watch our personalities and preferences bend a bit to impress and woo our potential life mate.

We fall. It’s almost (though not entirely) uncontrollable. Some call it infatuation, but it’s not entirely a bad thing. It’s how God made you.

God wants you to fall in love with the person you’ll wind up spending the rest of your life with. But he also wants your love to grow into something solid and timeless – something more steady and reliable than mere human emotion.

In time, the notes and phone calls usually get shorter. If infatuation – that euphoric chemical high or brain has been enjoying – is our only foundation, the “love” will start to fade (and to clarify, it isn’t really love if it fades).

Without love, we revert to our self-occupied single mentality. Sometimes there’s a painful tearing away and a sense of loss over the time invested into a relationship that didn’t make it. Sometimes, we forge ahead out of a sense of commitment or an avoidance of conflict.

Sometimes people stay married, but not truly in love anymore for years or decades without ever progressing and maturing to something deeper, better, and more unshakeable than those initial emotional highs. We’ll still say we’re in love, but when conflict and tension and suffering come, it gets harder and harder to hang in there and make it work.

I believe marriage is a divine growth opportunity. It’s our chance to grow deeper and to develop virtues that outlast any season of infatuation. What started as a couple falling in love can become a couple rooted in love.

How do you get there? How do you go deeper and develop something more lasting and solid than mere emotion? Paul said it best…

Be completely humble and gentle; be patient, bearing with one another in love.

– Ephesians 4:2 NIV

The apostle urged every believer to develop certain personal attributes all designed to take us deeper than the thrill of a season. He equipped us with virtues to last a lifetime. And he pointed out that the only real way to cultivate these character qualities is to do so in love.

Here are four ways to demonstrate you’re still in love with your spouse.

1. Be humble.

Humility isn’t thinking poorly of yourself. It’s not a matter of lowering your self-esteem or making self-deprecating comments.

Real humility is intentionally shifting your focus away from yourself. It’s having a realistic picture of 1) who you are, 2) whom God is, and 3) how important other people are.

Pride typically goes before the fall of any relationship, especially marriage. When life becomes about me having my way, asserting my right to be right and struggling for power over another, we’re uprooting ourselves from love and we’re living in selfishness instead.

Humility can be chosen. It can be developed, prayed about, and nurtured.

2. Be gentle.

The word here can also be translated as meek. And meekness isn’t weakness. Real meekness – the kind Jesus embodied – is best defined as strength, under control. It’s power, placed properly in submission to authority and in service to others.

Meekness involves the laying down of our need for power over our spouse and the developing of a kind of power under them. It’s serving. It’s sometimes silence when the temptation is to talk louder.

It isn’t appeasing, pleasing, or going soft in the sense of taking abuse. Rather, gentleness is the practice of forcing our emotions into submission to more holy and healthy interactions with our spouse.

3. Be patient.

To be patient is, quite literally, to suffer long. It’s about more than mere waiting. It’s about walking in partnership even in the middle of conflict and tension.

Guess how patience gets developed? Yep. Like any of the fruit of the Spirit, patience is developed as we’re placed in situations that require us to use it.

When you’re truly in love, you hang tough through sickness and health, for richer and poorer, for better or for worse. Again, patience is not about taking abuse or tolerating destructive behavior. But it does involve making allowance for each other’s faults and weaknesses.

4. Bear with one another.

The two words Paul uses for patience and forbearance are very similar, but have different shades of meaning. While patience has to do with enduring suffering, forbearance has more to do with the weight of the things we carry together.

To bear with one another really means, to partner with another person to help them hold up whatever burden is weighing them down. It’s working in tandem to carry the load.

A spouse who is in love stays by the hospital bed, walks through job losses, figures out the financial potholes, and shares the heaviness of grief when the other partner suffers a loss.

When I look at this list, I first see my own glaring need to grow. I haven’t, by any means, mastered them. I can recall far too many moments when I’ve asserted my right to be right, when I’ve lost my attunement with my wife’s pain, and when I’ve been unwilling to sustain gentleness and have chosen anger and defensiveness instead.

I also see the reality about my wife. Angie has been willing to bear with me and exercise patience through all kinds of idiotic seasons and episodes of my life.

Why would she stick it out? Keep showing grace? Demonstrate meekness on repeat? Because I am firmly convinced she’s in love with me, not because she says so, but because she proves it again and again.

And I’m in love with her. I still often feel those familiar warm, fuzzy feelings when we’re together, but far deeper than that, by the grace of God, we’re mutually cultivating a kind of love that outlasts any difficult season.

If you’re married, do an inventory. Check your own heart for these qualities. Where do you need to practice repentance? Where do you need to cultivate love in your heart and in your posture toward your spouse?

And if you’re not married yet, here’s the cool thing… Paul wasn’t actually writing these words for married couples. He wrote them for every believer, in every age, for all time. So when you become these virtues, you’re preparing yourself for stronger and healthier relationships for the rest of your days.